Thursday, March 08, 2012

Last year, as most of you know, I was obsessed with MLB.com's "badges", this curious sidebar diversion that mlb.com had constructed when "watching" live games over Gameday on a computer (mobile devices and tablets would not work). Three players from each team were selected seemingly randomly, and if a player achieved his pre-set condition (for example, "double" for a hitter, or "8 Ks" for a pitcher), you could "collect" the player's badge if your Gameday window was open at the time of the achievement.

The badge looked basically like a pog, with the team name on the top, player's name on the bottom (usually both names, but in some cases only the last name was listed in the badge--even when a first name might have fit without issue), and a goofy mugshot in the center. Infantile, right?

Players' badges could only be collected once (which was stupid). And if you had a game open, you could inadvertently collect the opposing team's badges as well--and you couldn't get rid of them once they entered your collection (another stupid thing, since people could be "trading" badges in a secondary market). Collections were kept in a nifty badge case via one's mlb.com login.

At first, of course, I thought it was ridiculous. But as the players started adding up, it got addicting to collect this meaningless currency, and watch my badge collection grow. And in one of the rare seasons where I didn't even buy a hobby box of baseball cards to open (one of my springtime rituals), it helped me keep up with players I didn't know.

By season's end, I had amassed 388 badges, enough to fill 24 "cases" (4x4 virtual badge cases). Badges were cut off for the post-season. But I was pretty psyched, even though they're absurd and have no value and are almost certain to be wiped from my account any second.

Which is why I want to document them for posterity here. I don't have enough time now to run regressions or stats on them, unfortunately. And some of them are missing images so I'm not even sure what team is being represented (which may be tricky if a player switched teams mid-year; my Rafael Furcal badge, for example, was registered with the Cardinals. Players switched positions in the cases all season long; at first, they were organized by date of badge acquisition, but even in the end, when they tried to alphabetize the players by last name, it wasn't clean (see; Jerry Sands, placed in between Torii Hunter and Raul Ibanez; why they wouldn't let a user organize his or her own collection makes no sense).

But grabbing those non-everyday players was a mini-thrill, since they had to be selected by the MLB.com badge gods, and then they had to perform in that game as well. All the stars had to align. Which made it cool for me to have snagged Jerry Sands and Marcus Thames.

By my quick count, I think I got 12 Dodgers in total, just under the league average, which means that there are some other teams that are over-represented there unfortunately (likely the by-product of having set up most of my Gameday viewing windows while at work, while east-coast games were starting to occur). I ended up leaving my work computer on and multiple windows open on almost every weeknight, in an effort to collect more badges. And of course, as the season progressed, it got harder and harder to add to one's collection.

But with the 2012 season almost upon us, I figure I should at least save the 2011 Dodger badges before they get wiped away for all time. So, without further ado:

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comments:

@Sax, was there any indication that MLB was running a contest or offering a reward for getting the most badges? You would think giving away some MLB.tv subscriptions would entice people into at least checking it out